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OpenGL May Take On A Greater Role Within Qt

Phoronix: OpenGL May Take On A Greater Role Within Qt

With Qt 5.0 finally seeing the light of day in the very near feature, plans are beginning to be laid for Qt 5.1. One of the improvements being talked about now for future Qt 5.x releases is support for more OpenGL enablers in the tool-kit...

What I don't get is why Apple being a huge and mega rich company is still stuck at OpenGL 3.2 ? Did their OSX graphics stack engineers fall into coma?

From what I can tell, the simple answer is the higher versions of OpenGL don't provide anything particularly useful to a desktop compositor. So it just isn't a priority for Apple.

I think Qt using the GPU to accelerate more of the desktop environment is going to be a great thing in the long run. Hopefully they can take it a step further and look into implementing some OpenCL accelerations for Qt applications as well.. That way, your GPU can help out the CPU in some common application intensive tasks. I know that the typical Linux user has got a very strong CPU and a rather weak GPU.

Gamers on the other hand, have got very powerful GPUs (dual or quad SLI) and rather weak CPUs (in comparison). So OpenCL can be useful there.

OpenGL on OS X

Originally Posted by mark45

What I don't get is why Apple being a huge and mega rich company is still stuck at OpenGL 3.2 ? Did their OSX graphics stack engineers fall into coma?

There are some hints that Apple may be moving on this. For example, with Mountain Lion glsl shaders will happily compile with #version 410 and some OpenGL 3.3 features such as specifying location qualifiers for per-vertex attributes works fine.